EAMS 2018 Take Aways from Day 2

EAMS Day 2

Day 2 of EAMS had a LOT of speakers (of which I was one). I couldn't possibly hope to do justice to all the interesting and varied content presented so I'll just pick out a few things that caught my eye and made me think "hmmm....what if I tried that out with .....".

The day started out with a Keynote from Paul Milner from nationalnumeracy.org.uk entitled "Maths outside the Classroom". Paul introduced us to some scary statistics about the lack of Numeracy among adults (in the uk, but have no reason to believe the story would be much different in Ireland). These poor levels of Numeracy in the working adult population are costing the UK economy approximately 1.3% of GDP. He made a great point that even if we somehow got the current education system 'perfect' it would take 50 years for this to address the adult numeracy problems. We were shown a diagram from the National Numeracy website showing the three key attitudes that an adult learner needs to have to succeed in improving their numeracy.

It's not surprising that the National Numeracy website has a self assessment Numeracy test but what is really interesting is that they also have an attitudinal assessment to assess these three core attitudes.

In the afternoon session I gave my own talk about the Transitioning to e-Assessment in Mathematics Education (TEAME) project. If anyone would like to know more about that why not have a look at teame.ie.

Late in the afternoon David Rickard spoke about Paper-Based e-assessment. The context of David's teaching would be very similar to my own so I could immediately see the relevance of his talk to my practice. I'd never heard of the Auto-Multiple-Choice software before and it piqued my interest. You can use it to create paper based MCQs that can be automatically marked by scanning in. I can certainly see how used in conjunction with Mal-rules, as discussed by Martin Greenhow, and topic interleaving you one could create really nice homeworks/in class practice.

I missed out on the evening workshops and the conference dinner along with the sprints on day three. If anyone out there would like to contribute a guest post on these I'd be delighted...

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